Chương 346: The Costs of a Kingdom

The courtyard of Obsidian Zero was no longer a place of stone and dirt; it had become a local failure of universal law. The atmosphere was a choking mix of ionizing radiation, sulfurous demonic exhaust, and the sweet, copper-tang of Void-leakage. Malacor, the Machinist Primus, and the Titan Lord stood in a defensive triangle, their silhouettes backlit by the flickering remnants of the Tier 8 Void Lords they had just spent their best artifacts to banish.

They were the apex predators of this sector — godlings who had likely never faced an outcome they couldn't bribe or butcher their way out of. And now they were staring at me. I rolled my shoulders, feeling the Ring of Wrath pulsing in a violent, synchronized heartbeat with the Bracelet of Gluttony on my left wrist. My true Hybrid Authority was no longer tucked away behind the polite mask of a support-weaver.

I let the liquid Voidflame pool at my feet, melting the obsidian floor into a shimmering mirror of black-red death.

"Tell me, Malacor," I said, my voice carrying through the sub-layers of the Lattice so that it vibrated inside their very souls.

"Was it worth the week of posturing? Did the data your scouts collected feel useful when you realized it was all a lie?" Malacor's burning eyes narrowed into two pinpricks of pure, calculated hatred. He raised a hand wreathed in ancient, white-gold inscriptions.

"Efficiency is not just about deceptions, Void born," Malacor rumbled, his voice like grinding tectonic plates.

"It is about mass. And I possess enough planetary weight to ensure that even a black hole chokes on the wreckage." The Demon Lord didn't wait. He triggered a Mythic-veiled skill, [Calamity's Second Coming]. The air in the courtyard was instantly replaced by a pressure-cooker of steaming magma-air. The thermal energy was high enough to incinerate the Tier 6 veterans on the walls if our shields hadn't been anchored to my Star-Core. I signaled for the fight to start. Rexxar moved first.

The Golden Lion launched into a boisterous, barking laugh that drowned out the Machinist's mechanical humming. He leaped fifty yards in a single kinetic burst, the [Event Horizon] claymore held high.

"TITAN! SHOW THE LION IF STONE CAN CRY!" Rexxar roared. The Titan Sovereign, wreathed in shifting plates of magnetic basalt, met the charge with a mace the size of a giant tree-trunk. The impact of their first strike sent a shockwave through the mesa that cracked our leaching-wards. The battle between the two massive front-liners became a specter of raw mass — Rexxar utilized his gravity-enforcement gear to triple his swing-velocity, while the Titan attempted to freeze the Lion's limbs with a petrification aura.

Nyx vanished. She didn't teleport or step into the Void; she simply occupied the "In-Between," utilizing her Lattice affinity evolution. She targeted the Machinist Primus. The brass-king reacted instantly, deploying a thousands-wide swarm of razor-edge gear-drones to blanket the space around him in a constant buzz of metal.

"Binary Decree: Total Detection!" the Primus clicked. It didn't matter. Nyx appeared for a millisecond inside his internal casing, her light-eating daggers carving into the logic-nodes of his mobility core, before she was gone again. The Machinist was a surgeon of machinery, but Nyx was an assassin of existence. Then, there was me. I took one slow step toward Malacor, and the air around us collapsed into a vacuum. I manifested two black sabres wreathed in the screaming Voidflame and lunged.

Malacor met my blades with his staff — the bone-ivory artifact that I now recognized as a [World-Soul's Femur]. It possessed a Conceptual Authority that was staggering, able to force a "Stat-Cap" onto any environment it touched. As our weapons clashed, I felt my Tier 7 peak strength attempting to buckle under the staff's weight. Malacor had a Tier 8 Peak authority that technically overshadowed mine. For a moment, his flames — that blistering, imperial white-gold fire — pushed my Voidflame back toward my wrists.

"Yield to the might of the Cinder Throne!" Malacor demanded, his fire expanding into a towering phoenix that looked like a mockery of my own.

"My Hunger doesn't recognize your ego," I whispered. I leaned into the [Void Star's Hunger]. I didn't try to out-fire him with heat using the Flame, although I felt like that definitely would have been an option. Instead, I started drinking. Every pulse of mana his staff sent toward me was pulled into the black hole behind my ribs. My [Symphony of the Animus Arch] acted as a bridge, deconstructing his high-tier spells into white noise that my Star-Cores could digest.

We traded hundreds of blows in a blur of relativistic speed. I lost shards of my Null-Steel armor to his kinetic surges; I felt his heat sear my pseudopores. But for every scratch he gave me, I siphoned a small fraction of a percent of his immediate output. This was becoming a war of attrition, a conflict my skillset was very equipped to handle. To the other Sovereigns, mana was a resource they had to manage.

To me, it was an endless, constantly refilling reservoir while the universe itself was turned into more fuel. Mid-fight, Malacor realized his direct offensive was stalling. He barked an order into a mental channel, and for a heartbeat, the focus of the three kings shifted. The Machinist Primus diverted his swarm toward the fort's ramparts, intending to slaughter my squad and force me to over-extend in their defense.

The Titan Lord slammed his mace into the ground, triggering a [Magmatic Fracture] meant to bring the entire mesa down, base and all. They were targeting my home, attempting to use it as a distraction for a combined attack. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. I didn't turn back. I knew what we had built. Anna stood atop the black flagpole, her silver eyes glowing. She didn't need me to say anything.

She released a specialized triple-arrow from [Final Word] — the [Tri-Chronos Lock]. The arrows hit the Machinist's lead drone-hive and physically froze it in a recursive loop of three seconds. Lucas stepped to the very edge of the breached gate, flaring his [Aegis] to its absolute maximum.

"NONE SHALL PASS THE ANCHOR!" His shield resonated with the mana beacons of the Sylvaris-relay. He transformed the incoming kinetic force of the Titan's magma-swell into static, cooling the liquid stone back into solid floorboards before it could touch our infantry units. Silas moved like a winter-storm along the rafters, providing covering frost-shadows that slowed the demons' remnants. They didn't need my attention. They were a powerful army of their own.

"You really should have kept your focus, was that a distraction for you or me?" I projected to Malacor as I manifested [Omnipresence] to appear beneath his guard. I abandoned the blades. I caught Malacor by the forearm and the horns, slamming his head down and shattering his nose with a knee kick. I hit the switch on [Gluttony] and [Wrath]. The black-red liquid of the Voidflame flooded Malacor's entire body.

"What is this madness... what kind of monstrosity has given you their backing!" Malacor screamed, his Tier 8 barriers melting as the Curse on my hand ignored his defenses. I triggered a new, unpolished technique I'd been visualizing during my meditation — an application of [Void Emperor's Omnipresence] meant for consumption.

"Proto-Sanctum," I dictated. A ten-foot bubble of absolute, unpiercable nothingness enveloped us both, shearing the space away from the courtyard. Malacor was suddenly pulled out of Bir-Z and into a simulation of the Void continent inside my ribs. He found himself standing on an obsidian plain wreathed in the smoke of Alecton's wrath. Malacor screamed as the eternal silence of my Void pressed into his soul.

He launched everything he had — thousands of white-gold lances, planetary-scale solar nukes, screams of authority. Each spell hit the boundaries of my internal realm and simply dissolved. In this pocket, the concept of a "Flame of Ash" was a rumor I had no interest in recording. The shadows around him began to whisper and laugh — echos of my own mind amplified by the [Symphony]. The Voidflame began to drip from the ceiling of the pocket Inner World, turning the space into an ink-dark oven.

Malacor looked at me, his fire reduced to a sputtering pilot-light.

"Who... what are you? This isn't the power of a Sovereign... You are an abomination... A hole in the universe…"

"I'm just the person you tried to evict," I told him. I opened the central furnace. The Black-Red fire engulfed Malacor completely. It didn't just char his flesh; it also consumed the data of his records. I felt his memories of Ignis-7, his centuries of struggle to rise into Sovereignty, and his Imperial indoctrination all being digested and sorted by the [Void-Star]. Within minutes, the Sovereign of Ash was gone. Not a single trace of stardust or soul-shards remained.

I had inhaled the absolute center of a planet's foundation. I dropped the pocket-dimension and manifested back in the real courtyard. I was just in time to see the conclusion of the others. Rexxar had cornered the Titan Lord near the leaching-pit. The Lion was covered in dust and stone-splinters, his laughter sounding ragged but triumphant. He brought the [Event Horizon] down with the physical weight of a moon.

"GOODBYE, RUNT!" The blade sheared through the Titan's tectonic-mantle, shattering the creature's mineral core in an explosion of grey sand. Rexxar hammered his fist against his gold chestplate, roaring into the aurora sky. Nyx manifested beside the Machinist Primus. The brass brain was a mangled mess of gears and sparks, attempting a final desperate emergency-warp. She struck the shadow he cast on the floor, instantly cancelling his teleport.

She then drove her obsidian dagger into the shadow-casing, severing the Machinist's tether to the Material plane. The metallic king let out a sound like a failing modem before collapsing into a pile of cold, disconnected cogs. Silence flooded Obsidian Zero. Our elites were cheering on the walls. Anna and Lucas dropped down to join us, looking over the debris of the most powerful Pioneer alliance in the sector.

"Is it done?" Anna asked, wiping sweat from her brow. I looked around at the cooling cinders of our enemies. I could feel the expansion of my Void-Star, the sheer volume of high-grade essence from three dead Sovereigns stabilizing my core near its Tier 8 requirement. I was a mountain of power standing on a fortress of black stone. But as I breathed in the mana-rich air of Bir-Z, my Lattice perception flickered. I had used a massive amount of output.

The black-red liquid fire was hard to mask even with the [Nullifying Veil] when the throttle was at maximum capacity. The "Sovereign Support" act was thoroughly dead. And far across the horizon, hidden within the deep magnet-fields and the glass trees, I felt them. There were observers. Scouts from the other three Factions who had remained quiet during the first and second week. The ones I was truly concerned about — the entities who hadn't joined Malacor's loud, blustering army, but had stayed back to observe.

"Stay sharp," I commanded the room, my voice killing the celebratory cheers instantly.

"Joyce, take the command-center and reset the shield-layers to Alpha-Grid. Lucas, top off the siphons with the remains of these demon-cores. We are back in business." I looked at the Ring of Wrath, which was humming a low, bloodthirsty note.

"There are four scouts positioned at the edge of my omni-range," I told Rexxar and Nyx.

"They saw exactly what I did to Malacor. They saw the fire. If those data-shards somehow make it back to their leaders, our anonymity in the tournament ends." Rexxar adjusted his grip on his claymore. Nyx's eyes flashed silver.

"They won't get a mile," Nyx whispered.

"No," I countered, looking at the distant horizon where the magnets reflected a dull silver light.

"You guys stay and defend the fort. If those scouts aren't new, they might be lures." I wreathed myself in a dense [Nullifying Veil] wreathed in resonance-logic to suppress my thermal signature.

"I'll be right back," I said, a slow, predatory intent cooling my voice to a whisper.

"I've got some fish to gut before the neighborhood wakes up. And once the quiet factions are blind... then we can start the construction." I vanished. The air in the courtyard stayed cold, long after I had departed through the Lattice. The Great Crucible was half-over, but as I sped across the Bir-Z wilderness toward the hidden eyes, I realized that I had finally found a challenge worth the friction. The two quiet factions... the Grave-Singers and the Hollow-Suns. They had been silent for two events.

I intended on finding out why before they got the chance to use what they saw against us. The Ledger was open, and I had quite a lot of ink left to use.